ILM and Sony Pictures Imageworks released Alembic 1.0

Alexandre Prokoudine 12. Aug, 2011
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A mere year after announcement of the first public version, Industrial Light and Magic and Sony Pictures Imageworks released the first stable version of Alembic — a co-developed open source framework that is built around a new file format for exchanging data between applications in heterogeneous animation and VFX pipelines.

The point of Alembic is that it simplifies using software of various vendors by flattening vendor-specific procedural data to non-procedural data and passing it further in the production pipeline.

The initiative has been supported by Autodesk, Side Effects Software, The Foundry and other companies from the very beginning, both in encouragement and code. As a matter of fact, Side Effects Software have already released Houdini 11.1 that supports Alembic 1.0. Or maybe you want Autodesk Maya? No problemo!

This first stable version was announced few days ago at SIGGRAPH 2011; the next day an informal meeting with OpenColorIO, Ptex, OpenImageIO, OpenEXR and Blender teams took place.

The current version is available for downloading. As for the future, apart from perfecting Alembic and its API (hence the Birds of Feather meeting), the core team seems to have some plans for standardization.